As we reported earlier this week, Apple is busy sending out cease and desist letters to small, defenceless projects to defend its trademark application (it doesn't actually own the trademark yet) for 'app store'. This has prompted many a discussion over the trademarkability of such a generic term, and over the origins of the abbreviation 'app'. Who came up with it? How old is it? To my surprise - the abbreviation is much older than you'd think, and in a way, it illustrates quite well the demise of the programmer. What? Read on.

If a single player were to become dominant and then claim exclusive rights to the generic term "wig store", then it causes a great deal of damage to other wig stores and only causes more customer confusion.

The point is they should all be allowed to call themselves wig stores generically since that actually describes what they sell. They should all come up in generic searches for "wig store".